Sit down, this one may take a while. It is a long story. It is convoluted. I am rooting for the Dodgers, against my conscious normal will. And I cannot help myself. I will say two things are helping, no Tommy LaSorda and I like Don Mattingly (former Yankee great). I was introduced to baseball by the Yankees. Grew up with a Yankee hat on. Not a real one like kids wear today. Mine was a shitty, cheap and tacky imitation. It was navy blue, it was felt, but the N Y was simply white felt GLUED on. And after months of wearing it the letters would curl up and you would have to glue them back down or beg for a new one. I wore this shitty, cheap tacky imitation hat because I loved the Yankees and because everyone else in the neighborhood had shitty cheap tacky imitation hats. That was the world we lived in. Nobody thought you needed one just like the players; geez, you had to BE a player to get a hat like that. I loved the Yankees because I was an east coast kid. I loved the Yankees because they were my home team. I had nothing but contempt for the Dodgers because a) we always beat ‘em and b) they left New York for that dreaded west coast city of Los Angeles. Here is where it gets weird. My mother loved the Dodgers. And my mother was my conduit to baseball. She followed it, she talked about it and yet she was stupid enough to be a Dodger fan. She was a Dodger fan BECAUSE they were a west coast team. She was a west coast person – and I had to struggle with that. So I struggled with that and felt sorry for my mother, who knowledgeable about baseball and my source of baseball discussions, was deluded enough to be a Dodger fan. My poor mother, what was she thinking? October 1963. I was a third grader in Miss Bukowski’s class at Eisenhower Elementary in South Holland, IL, a suburb on the south side of Chicago. I think I lived near Jim Croce’s friend Leroy Brown. Back then baseball did not cave in to the networks desire to make oodles of money on baseball. The games were played during the day and baseball made the world wait on it as opposed to waiting for the world. You were lucky if you had a male teacher, because those lucky ducks had a teacher that was smart enough to get one of the geeky (not a word back then) sixth graders to set a TV up in their room and they kept the game on during class. I had no such luck. I would ask for multiple bathroom breaks and dawdle outside the doors of the male teacher’s class and get updates. Of course I would sprint home at lunch to watch what I could of the game. And in 1963, as I would get home breathlessly there was my mother, glued to the TV gloating as Koufax would strike out Yankee after Yankee on the way to striking out 23 (the Cougan lucky number, what the hell?) Yankees in two games, THE MICK five times! MY Yankees lost four straight! My bombers scored only four runs in four games losing 5-2, 4-1, 1-0 and 2-1. I was devastated and my mother gloated all week. I was so depressed that I hardly noticed when the rest of the world was shocked in November. And on a side note, my mother had shaken JFK’s hand while he was campaigning. My mother died last October. I am still dealing with the loss. As I was rooting for the Braves last night to beat the Dodgers a funny feeling came over me. I asked myself why. Why? Why root for the Braves? Why not root for the Dodgers? Why not root for my mother’s old team? Go Dodgers.
